Silicon Nanophotonics for Future Multicore Architectures: Opportunities and Challenges

efficient communication between processing cores has never been more critical. Rapidly increasing application complexity and limited computing pow-er budgets have led to more and more lightweight cores replacing fewer bulky cores in emerging pro-cessor chips. The increase in core counts has put more pressure on the communication fabric which must now support many more streams of higher bandwidth data transfers than ever before. A direct consequence of this trend is that chip power and performance are now dominated not by processor cores but by the need to transport data between processors and to memory. Unfortunately, traditional electrical wires that make up the backbone of com-munication fabrics on computing chips today ar